Modern American decadence has created a habitat for religions purporting to be academic disciplines based on science and empiricism. The chief exemplars consist of: the Church of Woke—a faith that catastrophizes history, tradition, and competence hierarchies; Climate Religion—a faith of environmental catastrophism; and the Cult of COVID—a faith of viral catastrophism. Characterizing these tendencies as religions is not novel, but there is a novel question deserving of further explication that deals less with the religions per se than the leaders of these new religions (the “New Levites”). Implicitly, the common man finds the New Levites odious. However, to truly indict these failed leaders rhetorically and politically, we must first identify their misdeeds, abstract out the underlying pathologies, and properly characterize them, thus rendering the source of tension between the New Levites and the common man both explicit and mutually intelligible amongst critics. After much meditation, going beyond the superficial mendacity and duplicity of this priestly caste, I have isolated three conceptual seeds of acrimony that have been growing between the New Levites and the common man.
A Brief Etymology
The term Levites refers to members of the Tribe of Levi, Israelites who trace their ancestry to Levi, the third son of Jacob. The Levites lacked a unique tribal territory, instead they circulated among the other tribes of Israel and served the entire Israelite population as priests and subordinate sacerdotal roles. Whether you believe in the God of the Bible or not, scholars agree that it was the Levites who “assembled [the Torah] from its sundry literary sources” to form the cardinal books of the Old Testament (i.e., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The New Levites simply carry this naming convention forward.
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